I never did get why they had several pokemon that “evolve” by fusing together. I mean, they could easily, say, have said the mature koffing bud off a secondary version or something like that to explain it.

So anyway. I’ve finally gotten my last badge, I stand ready to challenge the League, so off I go!
To the abandoned power plant. It’s an entirely optional dungeon, so the pokemon’s levels are on par with Seafoam and it’s far too easy if you go later on.

Why is this random guy hanging out here? Well, actually it is a pretty good location. Very out of the way but some pokemon you can’t find anywhere else.
He’s pretty excited to see another person, I guess.
Well, yeah, I guess you could say that.
YES particularly if this helps me fill pokedex pages. Even if it doesn’t, seeing them magically informs the pokedex where they can be found, which is pretty helpful.
…that’s not a rare pokemon.

He’s totally adding me to the list of people he’s going to kill first when he finishes his doomsday device and takes over the world.

Yes, yes, and your other car is a Cadillac.
You know, I don’t think we see any other power plant, so where are they getting their electricity if this one was destroyed?

Or perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps it was abandoned because they no longer needed large, dedicated power plants for some reason. Assuming stuff like teleportation takes energy (and it should take a lot of energy) the fact Silph has pads everywhere just to screw around suggests they may have somehow moved beyond such concerns and have some infinite energy generator sitting around. Given alakazam’s ridiculous claimed IQ, maybe it solved all of everyone’s problems –

Hey, actually…

The anime makes a big deal about how only psychics can properly handle psychic types during Sabrina’s episode. And from another direction, alakazam presumably don’t exist in the wild since they’re a trade evolution. So – what if she evolved the first one not too long ago? It could be that it’s like the self-improving AI the singularity folks imagine – the sudden appearance of an incomprehensibly intelligent mind altering society with its ideas.

And taking a minute to beat up those uppity dojo guys, of course. Fuck those guys.

Anyway, in I go! The same ruin design as the building on Cinnabar, which, come to think of it, means this place didn’t necessarily just fall into disrepair. It could easily have been abandoned due to some huge fire or something, since we’ve seen the game doesn’t have any visual indication of a place being a burned-out shell of itself.
It’s just trying to lure me into a false sense of security.

Ah, raichu. They too were a subject of minor interest. I think the only stones you actually find in the game are the moonstones, and even if you did find one it’d presumably be something someone dropped, so how did so many pikachu manage to evolve? It seems to suggest that stones aren’t absolutely required. It could also be that they’re released pokemon, and it’s just that they gravitate to this area.

Ah, there we go.

As you can see, my avatar is unable to tell the difference between an item ball and a voltorb, despite the fact they should have a significant difference in size.
For some reason, these voltorb are much higher level than any of the pokemon I run into as random encounters.

Also, it’s annoying because they like to blow themselves up and try to steal their sweet experience points from me.

Now I can armor my pokemon!

Or not bother because really you can win this by just hitting hard.

What do pikachu look for in an environment? The fact they’re only found in Viridian Forest would suggest they’re not particularly urban pokemon, yet here they are in far greater numbers.

Perhaps, given the mention of shyness, they’re actually quite capable of handling urban environments except for the presence of people, so they come to infest out of the way ruins like this.

Though come to think of it, if it’s ruins, there’s no reason for the electric theme the rest of them have going for them. So maybe the power’s actually still running? Perhaps, as in the opening of the Electric Tales manga, pikachu are terrible urban pests but we don’t see that because they’ve been successfully driven off as troublesome vermin, and it’s only in places where that no longer happens that they’re common?

Perhaps it was the infestation of pokemon that drove people to abandon this power plant in the first place.

Hey look, the back sprite does clearly show the pincers are two different sizes. I guess that makes sense, the back sprites were from the original games and made to fit with those sprites.

…hey, come to think of it, why’d they replace the front-facing sprite with some slight improvements instead of spending that time redrawing the back sprites so they’re no longer pixilated?

For some reason this guy showed up before I’d run across the unevolved form.

Another composite pokemon.

The further in you go, the higher the bzzzt to item ratio. Not that I’m complaining, I basically have all the items I need by now. If anything, I need to go cull the TM list, since I’m almost out of space.

That’s my tauros moving faster than a voltorb six levels higher…

And yet, it won’t have the levitate ability, because Nintendo hates it.

Why would there be an electric-themed TM in an abandoned power plant, though?

Poor things. They found their nice peaceful corners, just wanted to take a nap, and some jerk keeps grabbing them and trying to pop them open to see what’s inside.

I already traded for this guy, so whatever.

See the blank screen here? That’s the result of mutual fainting. I switched out my tauros for another pokemon specifically because I wanted to make sure I’d get the experience if it tried destroying itself on me.

Yes, tauros first learns tail whip and then learns leer. Why? Possibly because they weren’t expecting anyone to ever use this guy. Even assuming they weren’t aware of just how uncatchable it ended up being, it’s one of three very rare normal types that don’t evolve found in an area full of new pokemon by a point where you should have already finalized most of your team. At least kangaskhan has the fact Giovanni probably had it beat you up going for it to encourage some use.

It’s actually rather surprising it’s such a good pokemon, all things considered.
It’s odd how things always end up in the farthest nooks. I guess the roof probably has quite a few holes and the rain and such end up washing things into these areas.

After a long time, it’s back to the problem of running out of attacking moves. This will likely remain an issue for the endgame period.
And finally…
::::D
Zapdos. I always thought the sprite looked silly – it’s just all too narrow. Those spaghetti legs, the cone beak, and those tiny wings… Despite that it’s the one I mostly used. Flying covers electric’s weakness, and electric negates flying’s weakness to the type.

Which made me wonder – given a team of pikachu would cause thunderstorms, could you summon one with –

Huh, it never occurred to me that that might be exactly what’s happened here.

So, while the moveset for articuno is the best ice elemental move and a weak flying one, you can see zapdos come with a weak elemental move and the best flying move. (Best in both cases naturally being a matter of overall usability, not just which has the highest attack power.)

And another unique encounter gone forever.

It’s usually around this stage the sense of loss starts to get to me. There’s so much here you can only do once, and there won’t be any new things to replace it. Soon, the world will be divided between things that are still there, but which I can never interact with, and things that I once interacted with and are now gone. Zapdos is no longer a mysterious unknown, it’s just another slot in my pokedex.

You know what would be cool? Randomly generated overland-sprite pokemon that appeared. They could be special in some minor way (probably just higher level than normal, though in later gens, it’d be a good use of shinies) but really the point is just that they’d be there.
Just like at Cinnabar, there’s a second exit that drops you off at the front entrance.

I’m actually quite fond of this dungeon for some reason. I think mostly I really, really liked that you could catch raichu here. I felt like I was getting away with something, and I ultimately amassed a half dozen or so. It’s particularly silly because you can buy thunderstones and because in the first games you never need to worry about lacking items anyway, but still.

Come to think of it I think I also just prefer trainerless dungeons. Which is weird, because I really like trainers and make sure to fight all of them for their money and experience, but I guess there’s just something to be said for the feeling you’re exploring a place, rather than wandering around an area packed with people. What I loved most when my family went camping was finding the rivers and climbing the rocks up a waterfall. What I hate most about hiking is doing it in groups. It’s not like I demand I be the only one who experiences something or else it’s not good enough, but when you’re in a big group, it makes it feel like nothing in particular is special, and you can’t really pay attention to the world around you because you’re distracted by the people in it.

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Fuck yeah, Zapdos! :D Still one of the most badass Pokémon ever. It’s actually the main reason I finally started doing what Nintendo wants me to and transferring my pokémon from earlier generations to later ones. Bringing over mine from HG/SS finally allowed me to beat the subway bosses in B/W!

“You know what would be cool? Randomly generated overland-sprite pokemon
that appeared. They could be special in some minor way (probably just
higher level than normal, though in later gens, it’d be a good use of
shinies) but really the point is just that they’d be there.”

Hm, I just looked again at what I thought I remembered and it’s not “randomly” so much as the weekly thing we’ve seen a couple times before, like with driftloon. Unlike that, though, they’re Pokémon you can obtain elsewhere, except they have different abilities. http://www.serebii.net/black2white2/interact.shtml